A guy who should've known about Stephenville

It’s a little weird to be briefing the recent chair of the Tactical Air and Land Forces Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee on a UFO incident he probably should’ve heard about five years ago. But there you are, telling Dr. Roscoe Bartlett about an aircraft without a transponder making a run toward President Bush’s “Western White House” in Crawford, Tex., in 2008, and about how military interceptors were no-shows as thing approached the no-fly zone. But nobody bothered to tell Bartlett about it before.

"Look at us — we’re just a very mediocre star on the edge of the galaxy. If a map of the United States were the Milky Way, we’d be some little place somewhere way down in Georgia. We’re pretty insignificant.” -- Former U.S. Rep. Roscoe Bartlett/CREDIT: politico.com

The former Republican congressman from Maryland listens intently. “And you say they got it on radar?” Bartlett asks from his home in Frederick.

Yep — it was tracked for more than an hour; MUFON released a study nearly five years ago. F-16s evidently drew near the thing, according to the radar chronology, but the warplanes backed off. The 10-term congressman asserts he “Absolutely!” would’ve wanted to know about such an event. “I wouldn’t have a problem making an issue out of it,” says Bartlett, who was defeated in the 2012 election at age 87. “Now, most members of Congress would probably shy away from this sort of thing because they’d have to suffer through accusations of ‘you’re crazy’ or ‘you’re extremist.’ But I like to think I’ve got an open mind.”

Duly noted. But it’s a lot easier to advocate intellectual curiosity (to say nothing of the national security ramifications) on UFOs when you’re out of office. It’s also easier with a $20,000 incentive, which is what Bartlett will make when he attends lobbyist Steve Bassett’s Citizen Hearing on Disclosure in Washington on April 29-May 3. Like five other former retired Capitol Hill colleagues, Bartlett will listen to UFO evidence from dozens of witnesses as the CHoD simulates a week-long congressional hearing.

The addition of Bartlett, a former Tea Party caucus member, makes for an eclectic lineup of panelists, which includes three Dems, two Republicans, a Libertarian, and three women, one of whom is African-American. But what seems a bit odd is that none of the panelists, collectively or individually, will be required to prepare a summary or recommendations based on the testimony they’ve heard.

“They were not recruited to become activists in this issue,” says Bassett. “A congressional committee’s job in a hearing is to gather information. You call in experts to testify, you question them, you collect information, that’s it. But the hearing process has decayed over the years into a kabuki theater where all they do is make political statements and piss on each other. It’s why Congress has a 10 percent public approval rating. So a congressman’s viewpoint is really not relevant — we’re going to do the job Congress should’ve been doing all along. That’s why we call it a Citizen Hearing.”

The odds of a) CHoD panelists provoking interest among their busy colleagues in Congress and b) the Incredible Shrinking Fourth Estate getting motivated enough to pursue rigorous investigations of UFOs seem remote, but Bassett says a followup documentary on the hearings — which will be released later this year — is designed to extend the shelf life of the event.

At any rate, Bartlett says he brings no agenda to the CHoD. He remembers the UFO issue being raised in the House just once during his 20-year tenure. That was early on, when New Mexico Republican Steven Schiff charged the General Accounting Office with recovering outgoing messages from Roswell Army Air Field during the 1947 controversy. The GAO, in 1995, discovered that those transmissions were missing, with “no information available regarding when or under what authority the records were destroyed.

Bartlett says he inferred no malfeasance from those results, but adds he has no idea if the You Can’t Keep A Secret In Washington cliche is true. “They tell you when you’re in office you have access to anything, but who knows, really?” he says.

“The possibility of extraterrestrial life somewhere else in the universe, yes, it just has to be,” says Bartlett. “Can they travel here? Who knows? I’ve got a totally open mind. I do know there are some UFO sightings that can’t be explained.”

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